Thursday, July 31, 2008

Traffic Generation Techniques

By Eddie Watkins


Getting traffic to your website using traffic generation techniques, is one of the most important aspects of your online business. If you don't receive visitors to your website, your online business will not survive.

Obtaining traffic is one of the main reasons for having a website. Let's compare your website to a shoe store. In your shoe store you sell tennis shoes, loafers, pumps, flip flops and golf shoes. If no one comes into your store to purchase your array of products, your business will soon go down the tubes. Whatever medium you choose to use, you must advertise your business. Just as with your website, you must have visitors in order to thrive.

Without website traffic you may as well give up, as a shopping mall store would close its doors, so what can you do to attract the traffic that your survival depends upon? The answer to that question could fill a book - and a very large book! Much depends on how you look at it, but there are basically four different ways of directing traffic to your website:

1. Search engines 2. Online advertising 3. Offline advertising 4. Word of mouth, or buzz advertising.

We don't have the time or space to go over all the techniques that you are probably use to hearing about. So let's have a look at a couple of ways that are not talked about much but are very productive traffic generation techniques.

Search Engines

This is not about SEO because you will have read all you can about that. It works if you know what you are doing, but generally not if you just follow instructions by rote. However there are ways to use search engines to get to your web pages.

One of these techniques are smart pages. Your visitors never see these pages, but the search engines can find these pages when they spider the web. The way they work is for you to create as many of these pages as you can using keywords on your website that people use to seek information. There is software out there that you can use to make this process easier.

The way that the smart pages work is when a person is searching for a certain keyword phrase, using any one of the many search engines. Your web page has usually already been indexed for that certain keyword. So wouldn't you think that the person would be directed to your indexed web page. That not so. They would be directed to the page that the software has been programmed to send them to. A person can set up as many of these smart pages as they deem neccesary, and the visitor that does the search will be sent to the page that the software is set to send them to.

You can used this as one of the many techniques, to get the search engines to direct traffic to a certain page where you have information regarding a certain topic.

Online Advertising

There are many online advertising techniques that people use, including using blogs to advertise their URL and article marketing for the same purpose. Web2 sites have been used, but they are not very productive, but there are other options. You can get free links from your own Facebook page: for every website or blog you possess, and what about Twitter? You can advertise your website on your twitter posts. You can also use PPC, but not Adwords that can be expensive. Searchfeed offers good pay-per-click ads for 1 cent. If you use searchfeed, you can get by spending $25 a day, which equates to 2500 visitors to your website every day - for $25!

Classified Advertising

A lot of people forget about the power of classifed advertising. Putting a small ad in your local newspaper has a lot of power. Sending postcards through the mail, advertsing your website has also been proven to be quite productive. Having flyers made up from your local print shop, and distributing them to certain areas around town is also a great way to use the power of offline advertising. These avenues are sometimes forgotten by people trying to get the word out, when promoting their products.

Buss Advertising

Whether you know it or not, people are out there looking for your products. Talk about your website to everyone, to your relatives, your friends and family. You have to place yourself in front of your potential customers. Send out flyers, mail postcards, place an ad in your local newspaper advertising your products. People are always looking for a product that is going to solve a certain problem that they have, or an easier way to do a certain thing, and this is your opportunity to feel that void. Get the word out.

One thing that is for sure, is that you will always need traffic to your website. You will have to find what works for you. If you have not tried some of the ways mentioned in this article, you might be missing something who knows.

The importance of traffic cannot be overemphasized, and traffic generation techniques are of extreme importance to the future of your online business. Why? Because without visitors you might as well have no website at all.

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